Moving past the confines of typical suburban life

Sad days

One of our dogs has some kind of cancer that is growing in his stomach, it will eventually kill him. Or old age will catch him, as he is nearly fourteen. He is doing really well these days tho, the supplements we have him on seem to be helping for now. We’ve been preparing ourselves for his passing for a while now, and spending as much quality time with him as possible. He is a very good dog.

Our other dog seemed to be bloated Monday night, he just looked really full to me. He is not a breed that is prone to bloat so I really didn’t think to much of it. He seemed to be acting fairly normal aside from that. I’ve never seen bloat, and don’t know too terribly much about it.

Tuesday morning he was acting sluggish and didn’t want to move around too much. I brought him inside and called the vet. She, like me, didn’t think bloat either, tho his stomach was back to normal now anyway. We gave him some pepto and he seemed to be improving.

Wednesday morning he seemed fine before I left for the chiropractor, I’ve been sick this last week and was fighting off a three day migraine. When I got home that afternoon he seemed to have taken a turn for the very worse.

I think he was just waiting on me to die. I moved him into the living room and he was gone within 20 minutes.

We are just completely blind sided by this. It was completely unexpected.

He came to me by a very convoluted story, from a shelter in North Carolina. He had a neurological disease that gave him a tremor, and we never knew the cause. He was a very special dog, my blue merle border collie. I know he had a good life while he was with me. As near as I could come up with, I think he was around 9 years old. He was around a year old when I got him, so he had a good long life with me.

I never expected him to live to old age, because of the neurological thing he had going on. I just never expected him to go like this.